Ross Devenish’s Boesman and Lena (1973): The Politics of Place and Performance. Lesley Marx, University of Cape Town The Theatre Upstairs, London, June, 1971: Athol Fugard worries about the ‘naturalistic or “documentary” production of Boesman and Lena’, especially the transformation of the ‘metaphor of the “rubbish”’ into the ‘geographical specifics of the play’.1 After the first day of rehearsals, he decides ‘that our small space […] is right, that having our audience around us on four sides is what we must take on here. In the space, a pile of authentic London rubbish -- the three actors come to it, pick their way through it, find what they need, put it on, load it up’.2 There is a tension here between a naïve naturalism (real rubbish) and a rejection of the conventions of representational theatre: with neither proscenium arch nor fourth wall, the dramatic power of the London production could invade the space reserved for the audience in a radically meta-theatrical way.3 Certainly, this power was experienced by a filmmaker who had been filming documentaries in major conflict zones, including the Congo and Vietnam. One of his most impressive accomplishments was the 1968 documentary for Thames Television on the American Indian, narrated by Marlon Brando. The forced removals of indigenous people that scarred American history bear signal similarities to the violent dislocations and traumatic relationship to space and place that marked apartheid South Africa. Ross Devenish recalls that watching the play was a ‘seminal moment’ for him: ‘I knew that I had to be involved. If I missed that, I’d missed my life’. Through Zakes Mokae, who was playing Boesman, Devenish was introduced to Athol Fugard. ‘I would like to make a film’, Devenish told the playwright.4 1 Athol Fugard, Notebooks: 1960-1977 (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1984), p. 191. 2 Fugard, p. 191. 3 The Durban production of 1970 also had the actors putting on their characters on stage in front of the audience with the house lights up (Fugard, p. 185). 4 Ross Devenish, Personal Communication, July 2012. 1 In agreeing to have his play filmed Fugard’s passionate commitment to the theatre would now meet the exigencies of a very different medium. Trying to answer his wife Sheila’s question about his choice of medium, Fugard writes: ‘In the theatre of course my fascination lies with the “living moment” -- the actual, the real, the immediate, there before our eyes, even if it shares in the transient fate of all living moments. I suppose the theatre uses more of the actual substance of life than any other art. [...] The theatre uses flesh and blood, sweat, the human voice, real pain, real time’, what he will call the ‘Carnal Reality of the actor in space and time’.5 A key factor in Fugard’s love of theatre is love of the actor: ‘You see, I worship the actor.[...] Like Artaud, I believe that the actor should burn himself alive and wave at the audience through the flames’.6 The spectator’s relationship to event and actor in film is quite different. On the one hand, the indexical relationship of the photographic image to the material world foregrounds a realist, representational mode, especially in location shooting; on the other, both location and actor are always caught in the interstitial, fetishistic space of presence and absence.7 With regard to the actor, James Naremore describes the distinction between theatre and film: ‘Even in the most pictorial proscenium drama […] the audience remains present to the actor, sending out vibrations or signs that influence the intensity, pace, and content of a given performance’.8 In film, however, the impenetrable barrier of the screen favors representational playing styles. [...] every filmed performance partakes of what John Ellis and other theorists have described as the ‘photo effect’ -- a teasing sense of presence and 5 Fugard, pp. 89, 171. 6 Mary Benson, ‘keeping an Appointment with the Future: the Theatre of Athol Fugard,’ Theatre Quarterly, 7 (1977-78), 77-87 (p. 84). 7 See notable discussions of these issues by André Bazin, Roland Barthes and Laura Mulvey. 8 James Naremore, ACting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 29 2 absence, preservation and loss. […] And because the performance has been printed on emulsion, it evokes feelings of nostalgia as it grows old, heightening fetishistic pleasure.9 How, then, do we experience the film version of Fugard’s play? He wrote as forced removals increasingly sought to entrench apartheid’s policy of separate ‘development.’ Trying to embed the experience of his protagonists within that socio- political context, Fugard also wanted to give them wider relevance, where the ‘rubbish’10 would be both real and metaphorical. Boesman and Lena are impoverished dislocated vagrants, victims of apartheid geography and economic oppression. They wander through the bleak landscape of the Eastern Cape, remembering the places and place-names that make up their tattered histories, Boesman increasingly abusive, Lena desperately trying to sustain joy and dignity in the face of his drunken, humiliated raving. Fugard had always grappled with the kind of play he was trying to write, drawn repeatedly to universal themes: Boesman and Lena are ‘a metaphor of the human condition which revolution or legislation cannot substantially change’.11 Later, he wants ‘to go beyond the mudflats as the context of their predicament and into their minds (their visions and lunacies)’.12 Yet he also has ‘nagging doubts’ that he is ‘opting out’ of ‘“social” content’, that he is ‘not saying enough’.13 What compels attention in Ross Devenish’s adaptation is the fine balance between, on the one hand, the dramatisation of the political events that shape the lives of the characters and the haptic realisation of the material world they inhabit and, on the other, the often comic, derisory self-awareness with which they perform their past 9 Naremore, p.30. 10 In the play, the term refers to the degradation suffered by human beings as well as their material environment: Boesman cries out: “We’re whiteman’s rubbish….His rubbish is people.” 11 Fugard, p. 168. 12 Fugard, p. 177. 13 Fugard, p. 181. 3 and their present. Their self-reflexivity speaks to broad issues of consciousness and the construction of the self that have a family resemblance to the Beckettian world Fugard so admired. The film’s key addition to the play, a prelude showing the eviction and demolition of the shanty town inhabited by Boesman and Lena, is not merely an opening out of the play but a foregrounding of the political realities of the day and their impact on human lives. The sequence precedes the opening titles. Editing is especially effective in the suspenseful foregrounding of the effects of fear and violence on the victims, before we see the agent of fear and violence. After a slow pan across the shanty town revealing ordinary daily activities, a cock crowing cheerily, we pause on a young woman looking intently into the distance. She calls to her husband. We cut to the inside of the shack where the family of four sleeps together. He responds and we hear her voice: ‘Daar kom dit nou’ (‘There it comes now’). He gets out of bed and joins her as she looks off-camera. We cut to an elderly woman who also looks up anxiously: ‘Jan,’ she says, ‘dis die bulldozer wat hier aankom, Jan,’ (‘Jan, it’s the bulldozer coming, Jan’) and her husband lifts his head from his mug of coffee as we cut to a long shot of a bleached landscape. We cannot see the bulldozer clearly but now we know what the far-off rumbling sound is. A cut to a close-up of a dog that runs out of a shack, barking, reveals the woman we will come to know as Lena (Yvonne Bryceland). She gets up, struggles to the door of the shack and looks out, mouth slightly open, eyes wide in dismay as she calls to the man who joins her at the door. Now we can see the bulldozer drawing nearer, cross cut with close-ups on the still, stricken faces of those whose homes it is about to demolish. The faces are a cross-section of humanity, in terms of age and skin colour especially -- many of the shanty dwellers are very light-skinned emphasising the irrationality of racial classification. In their stillness, the faces convey the simplicity and terrible stoicism of the ‘Okies’ as their home is demolished in John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath. Should these Faulknerian overtones (‘They endured’) overwhelm the real horror of the experience of violent dislocation, the rhythm of the film changes. A white man pulls up in his car and announces (in English) that the shanty dwellers must leave at once. 4 The screen fills with desperate scurrying as these men, women and children try to rescue what they can of their meagre possessions. Emerging from the group of victims is Boesman (Athol Fugard) who, after packing away his empty bottles, calls to the driver of the bulldozer with a mocking bow and a sweep of the arm: ‘All yours master’, and then proceeds to help smash the shacks, grinning and dancing, wearing a CB (Port Elizabeth) number plate on a chain like a victor’s sash. In an ironic gesture of unctuous obeisance, he begs the cigarette from the lips of the driver, who tosses it to him with a condescending smile. Both Boesman and Lena will continue to demonstrate a mastery of mimicry and role play (especially the role of self-abasement) that is deeply self-aware and that satirizes their toxic relationship with the white man.